


Not

by catty_the_spy



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Fever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-10
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2018-02-16 22:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2286540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catty_the_spy/pseuds/catty_the_spy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Whether they’re Katniss and Peeta or Kale and Persimmon, these star-crossed lovers from District Twelve still have to make it through the Hunger Games.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not

**Author's Note:**

> for the h/c bingo prompt: “cuddling”. Have I ever written genderswap before? Not all the characters have been swapped, but other than a few changed genders everything’s the same as canon.  
>  Also my s key is sticking, so if you see any ‘he’s or ‘hi’s where they shouldn’t be, let me know

  
Persimmon Mellark isn’t the thinnest of girls. She’s ‘stocky’, a wrestler. Standing in that platform in her mother’s grey dress, with her face blotchy from crying and her hair in a stiff chignon, she blows her first chance to win the heart of the Capitol. They go for prettier, thinner girls. But on the stage, she isn’t thinking of sponsors. She’s thinking “I’m going to die” and then she’s thinking “Kale Everdeen is going to die with me".

She knows Kale. Her father pointed him out on the first day of school.

“You see that boy?” he’d said.

Kale was wearing bright red suspenders and his hair was slicked flat towards his ears.

“I was going to marry his mother once upon a time.”

She remembers that day clearly. Her hair was in two little braids, and she was wearing a new dress. She heard Kale sing, and the birds stopped to listen, and Persimmon fell in love.

 

“I fell in love with you,” she says in a cold wet cave, shivering and sweating while Kale holds her tight. “But I was too afraid to talk to you. Stupid. I was so stupid.”

 

Persimmon isn’t the prettiest of girls. She isn’t ugly, despite what her mother says, but she knows she’s plain.

“You have one of those faces,” Danny Cartwright tells her. “When you’re talking everybody looks at you. And you aren’t pudgy like me.”

‘One of those faces’, she thinks. Her face doesn’t hold a candle to Kale’s. Kale’s the best looking guy in the district.

“You have good features,” says Porthos, Persimmon’s stylist, “and an even better smile. Find a reason to smile. And don’t worry, sweetie, they’ll love you.”

They love her, sure, but only when she talks about Kale, their boy on fire.

 

“I’m on fire,” she groans, but Kale tightens his grip.

“It’s just the fever,” Kale says. His voice is getting hoarse. “I promise. It’s just the fever.”

 

Persimmon Mellark isn’t the most talented girl in the world. She can wrestle, sure, but what’s wrestling when your opponent can spear you from ten feet away. And what use is drawing or baking? She can’t bake her way out. She can’t paint them all to death.

“She’s strong,” Kale protests over dinner. “She can lift a fifty pound bag over her head. I’ve seen it.”

“What good is that?” Persimmon demands.

Haymitch doesn’t interrupt them. He’s laughing like it’s funny – like it’s funny that everyone knew, from the moment Kale volunteered, who the winner would be.

 

“It’s a trap,” she says. “It’ a trap. You can’t go.”

“You’re dying!” Kale snaps. “What do you want me to do?”

“Stay with me. Leave me to die. I don’t care, just don’t go to that feast. Promise me,” she begs.” Please. I’m only slowing you down; it’ not worth it. Promise me you won’t go.”

“Okay,” Kale says at last. He lies back down and pulls Persimmon into his chest, the same position they’ve slept in since he found her. He kisses her hair. “Okay, I won’t go.”

 

“Why couldn’t you be pretty?” her mother says with a sigh.

“I’m sorry mommy,” Persimmon says, because she’s seven and doesn’t have anything else to offer.

“Well,” her mother says with a sigh, “at least you weren’t a boy. I couldn’t bear another boy.”

And still sighing, she sends her daughter away. Down to the bakery, where her father teaches her to bake cookies. If she can’t be pretty for her mother, at least she can be a baker for him.

 

“I kept telling him it wasn’t worth it, but Pine wouldn’t listen to me. He treated that thing like it was a real baby. Ugh. But wouldn’t you know it, he was right. The stupid goat didn’t die.’

Persimmon smiles. She lets her head fall sideways onto Kale’s shoulder. She’s dreamed of this.

Kale’s story trails off like trash in a breeze, discarded in favor of something more important.

He presses his lips to hers.

Dying isn’t so daunting now that all her dreams have come true.

 

Persimmon lurks around the side door when Kale comes by with the Hawthorne girl, trading squirrels for bread. She thinks of all the things she wants to say to him. She paints the picture in her mind the way she ‘paints’ his face with pastels.

She opens her mouth but the moment is gone. Kale looks towards her and around her. Her father passes her the squirrels with a smile.

“Why don’t you take these upstairs for me, sweetheart?”

Kale is gone, vanished like ghost.

 

Persimmon doesn’t know the taste of sleeping syrup.

 

Her mother buys her pastels for her first reaping day. An expensive gift, even second-hand like these are.

For a moment her mother is proud of her. She makes her mother a portrait, and her mother kisses her cheek and helps her pin up her hair. She doesn’t complain when Persimmon babbles all the way to the square.

For the second reaping, her mother smacks her to hut her up. Persimmon stands in the crowd with a red mark on her cheek

 

She panics, alone with her fever and her infected leg. Maybe Kale took her advice and left her to die. Maybe Cato caught him when he went for water. Maybe he did the stupid thing and went to the feast.

Maybe he’s dead because of her.

She hugs herself. She lets the tears dry on her face. With her mouth this dry, she’s surprised she has the water for them.

 

“I want to show them they don’t own me,” she tells Kale on the roof, while below them a city cheer for their impending deaths.

She has an eight, and a strategy, but she know that this is it for her. She’s not making it out.

It’s not her name they’re chanting in the streets.

Her last night before the arena, she can hear then chanting the name that beats in the dark corners of her heart.

“Kale! Kale! Kale! Kale!”

 

“Kale!” she cries when he stumbles into the cave. If she’s hallucinating, she hopes it stays until she’s gone.

It’s not a hallucination.

“What are you-”

“Shh.”

He went to the feast at the cornucopia. His forehead is bleeding.

The Capitol medicine works fast. The pain is gone almost instantly. Maybe if it works fast enough she can untangle her hair and take a dip in the river. Maybe she can hold Kale properly instead of just being held.

“Let me…” she starts, spreading the medicine on his forehead. Then she kisses him, because she still can.


End file.
